Louisiana’s vanishing coast hurting economy

By DENNIS CAMIREGannett News Service

ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La. — The land is rapidly vanishing
and the open water is growing here and throughout Louisiana's
coastal wetlands, a nursery for a quarter of the nation's seafood,
a critical supply link for a third of the country's energy and
home of the rich culture of the Cajuns.

"I was born over there," Michel Dardar said, pointing
to a spot about 500 feet from his weather-beaten home in this
island community that is shrinking in size and population. ``See
over there? We used to plant a garden. We had a good crop of potatoes,
all kinds of vegetables, but now it’s all water.’’

Dardar has spent all of his 74 years here, working on dredge
boats cutting oil and gas exploration canals, building ships,
fishing and oystering. "I don't want to move,’’
he said.

But Dardar and tens of thousands of others in the sole of Louisiana's
geographically shaped boot are faced with that grim reality as
the Gulf of Mexico consumes more and more of the land.

Scientists estimate that roughly half the wetlands in the contiguous
United States has been lost to farming and development since the
late 1700s. But Louisiana's coastal wetlands haven't been transformed
to other uses. They've vanished.

The size and speed of the loss are breathtaking.

About 24 square miles of Louisiana wetlands disappear every year.
Since 1932, the gulf has eaten nearly 2,000 square miles —
an area roughly the size of Delaware. That’s the equivalent
of about half the coastal wetlands along the entire Atlantic Seaboard.

And the impact of that loss could be felt far beyond Louisiana,
drastically reducing the fish and shellfish on Americans’
tables, gasoline for their cars and natural gas for their homes.

The causes are complex, some man-made like the levees that control
Mississippi River flooding while choking off sediment that sustains
the delta’s wetlands, others natural like the compacting
of wetland soils.

The proposed solutions to protect the remaining 5,800 square
miles of wetlands are just as complex — and costly. Big
business, state and federal officials, scientists and others are
working on a massive plan — costing up to $14 billion and
taking decades to finish — to stop the loss and restore
some of the eroded marsh.

If nothing is done, said Enrique Reyes, a University of New Orleans
assistant professor working on the plan, "the other thing
is to kiss New Orleans goodbye.’’

Ecology, economy under siege

Louisiana’s wetlands are a stewpot of some of the nation's
favorite seafood delicacies — shrimp, blue crab, redfish,
crawfish and oysters.

Altogether, the state's commercial fishing industry caught 1.2
billion pounds of fish and shellfish in 2001. That's about 27
percent of the nation's catch by weight, excluding Alaska and
Hawaii, with a dockside value of $342.7 million.

Three-quarters of the northern Gulf of Mexico's fish and other
aquatic life depend on the state's wetlands for survival. The
marshes provide shelter for their young and produce food for larger
species such as yellowfin tuna, red snapper and swordfish.

The wetlands also are a refuge for millions of birds and butterflies
that live in or pass through the region on migratory routes to
Central and South America.

Man’s creations are threatened by the eroding land, too.

More than 24,000 miles of pipelines buried in the marsh could be
increasingly vulnerable to the destructive power of gulf storms.
Those pipelines carry natural gas, crude oil and refined petroleum
products from production platforms in the coastal area and offshore
to refineries in Louisiana, Texas and the Midwest for use by Des
Moines, Iowa, gasoline stations or Indiana farms.

"As the coastline has receded and disappeared, the size
of the surge and waves has increased enormously," said Jack
Caldwell, secretary of Louisiana's Department of Natural Resources.
"That is going to tear up these little (oil and gas) platforms
that were built in bay conditions.’’

Also at risk is the Greater New Orleans port system, which handles
more cargo tonnage than any other in the nation.

Bayou Lafourche, an old river channel cut off by a dam in the
early 1900s, is losing the lush marsh that once graced its banks.
Water may soon engulf Louisiana Highway 1 and cut off Port Fourchon,
which services many of the 600 offshore oil and gas platforms
nearby.

The gulf has already broken through to the intracoastal waterway,
threatening barge shipping on the Louisiana section of a 1,100-mile
canal from Apalachee Bay, Fla., off Florida‘s panhandle,
to Brownsville, Texas.

"If we don't do something about it, the barges will be exposed
to gulf conditions and it will stop traffic or slow it down,"
Caldwell said. "That economic cost will be enormous."

The value of the infrastructure at risk is estimated at $100
billion by the coalition of government, business and environmental
groups working to stop the erosion.

The Shell Oil Foundation has contributed $3 million to spread
the word about the looming disaster.

"It is an absolute crisis,'' said King Milling, president
of Whitney National Bank and chairman of Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster's
coastal commission. "It's a crisis both in terms of the nature
of the threat; it is a crisis also because time is of the essence."

The loss of wetlands exposes not only pipelines and ports to
the full fury of storms, but also homes, businesses and churches.

"It is disappearing,’’ said Dardar, pointing
across the road to water almost surrounding a house on the edge
of Isle de Jean Charles, about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans.
“We can see the land is gone right now.’’

New Orleans averages 5 feet below sea level in some places. It
is protected by an extensive network of levees and pumps. But
as miles of protecting marsh disappear, residents of the city
and its suburbs — wedged between the Mississippi River and
Lake Pontchartrain — become more exposed to hurricanes.

Crisscrossing pipeline and navigation canals have allowed saltwater
intrusion into the formerly brackish and freshwater marsh, killing
the grasses, shrubs, willows and oaks that held the soil in place.
The canals also exposed more land to the eroding tides.

But the major problem is that the federal government's effort
to tame the Mississippi River to prevent disastrous floods and
ease navigation cut off the life-giving flow of fresh water and
an estimated 160 million tons of sediment to the wetlands and
barrier islands.

"In controlling the Mississippi River, we created the problem,"
said Clifford Smith, president of T. Baker Smith & Son, a
civil engineering firm based in Houma. "It seems to me we
should use the river to help solve the problem."

Restoration effort massive

By 2050, the state will lose another 700 square miles, according
to the U.S. Geological Survey.

"You're living on borrowed time today," said Fred Caver,
deputy director of civil works for the Army Corps of Engineers.
"You have until the next big storm zeroes in on coastal Louisiana
directly."

A main feature of the wetlands restoration and rehabilitation
plan being put together is to divert up to 200,000 cubic feet
a second of the Mississippi River down a 60-mile channel to feed
the existing marsh and build two new deltas in Terrebonne and
Barataria bays. The plan calls for at least 15 smaller river diversions.

Dozens of other projects would involve closing some pipeline
and navigation canals or installing locks to keep out vegetation-killing
saltwater and using dredged material to create marshes and restore
barrier islands.

The estimated cost of the plan is $14 billion. By comparison,
the effort to restore 2.4 million acres of the Florida Everglades
is estimated to cost about $8 billion, with the federal government
paying half.

Louisiana officials say they, too, will need federal help for
their wetlands, which have gotten far less public attention despite
the potential economic and environmental costs to the rest of
the nation.

"The wetlands belong to the whole country in the sense that
the products that we produce are utilized through the whole country,''
said Sen. John Breaux, D-La., a Cajun who grew up in the state's
southwest wetlands and has been involved in restoration efforts
for decades.

"It's not just Louisiana wetlands," he said. ``It's
America's wetland.''